It is extremely hot in the Netherlands right now, so I was relieved to find out that the Belgian channel showed this, so that I could watch something in my much cooler basement, instead of behind my PC in this boiling living room. ‘The Kid with the Bike’ is perhaps the most accessible film of the influential brothers Dardenne of whom I have as of yet never seen a picture, but I still had some trouble to get into it. Notwithstanding the fact that the young Thomas Doret convinced me of his skill soon enough, his performance appeared unnatural to me during the movie’s first shots. As soon as it began to live up to its IMDb-description, however, not only…

France, Sweden, Ireland, the UK and sometimes Italy have been notorious countries that apply an absorbing, minimalistic style to the events depicted to make them more serious in tone and more invasive psychologically. The Dardenne brothers put that trend to good use in what may be their most simplistic film, but like it has been said before: "In simplicity lies complexity".

Some parallels may be drawn between Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), as we witness a boy with a strong lack of parental figures and in a world of adulthood irresponsibility wandering aimlessly through the streets, he seems to follow the same steps that any Antoine Doinel would make: feeling misunderstood and alone, escaping his home, engaging in thievery,…

“I’m not dreaming anything.” I did not intend to watch this film today, but fell upon it while adding some other films to a watchlist. Once I watched the trailer, I instantly knew I had to see it. A young boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret) is abandoned by his father. Despite the efforts of a patient group home and eventually loving caretaker, Samantha (Cécile de France), he is full of anger, stubbornness and sadness. Cyril makes a string of bad decisions as he tries to figure out where his Dad (Jérémie Renier) is and eventually hears a harsh truth. The boy then gets mixed up with a street thug even though he is strongly forbidden by Samantha. He obviously cares…

I started watching this thinking it was just going to be another maverick-forced-us-to watch-this family drama, but I loved this! The children's perspective was so incredibly sensical and story driven! Strong direction and raw characters.

Tragic, maturing. My first reaction at the end was something like sorrow or sympathy, especially when they finally let that piano come in on the Beethoven concerto. But then I realized that the struggle felt the entire time was that we knew exactly what was going to happen next at every step of the film - except for the very end - when we're surprised by how much growth has happened in such a short time.

It steers a bit too close towards becoming a melodrama at the end, and my god is it hard to root for a kid that is such a little shit, but overall the sentiment that the Dardenne’s bring alongside with their excellent direction makes this film worthwhile.

I nearly cried watching this in class, which aside from Amour, has never happened before. And that's fucking Amour. I didn't even choke up here because it was unbearably sad, although there certainly is a fair deal of unexaggerated melancholy at times. The film was just so perfectly realized from every aspect that it was an overwhelming experience to watch it.

Most simply stated, the film seeks to define more thoroughly the term "troubled youth." A term for which the decontextualized result is typically the only representation of, and this representation in turn has led to gross simplification of kids and teens with behavioral and emotional issues, making it much easier to cast them aside as an other. Rather than…